Hot Pockets is one of the favorite food brands of American working moms and teenagers. The foods, which get cooked in minutes in microwave ovens, are tasty, nourishing, and easy to make. The brand was introduced at the beginning of the 1980s and still takes the leading position in the to-buy lists of many American families.
Semi-cooked products are an integral part of modern man’s diet. Of course, everyone has their own opinion on this, but, as numerous market studies show, hundreds of thousands of products from this category are sold every day in the world. Buying convenience foods does not require a lot of money, and their preparation – a lot of time and effort. The variety of semi-finished products allows you to make the meal unusual and unique every day, which, in fact, attracts the buyer.
America is known to be a leader in the consumption of convenience foods, and one of Americans’ favorite brands is Hot Pockets. The company was founded in the early 1980s and was acquired by the giant Nestle in 2002.
Today the brand line includes various products: turnovers, sandwiches, and pizzas. But the company doesn’t stay in one place. Thus, in 2022 Hot Pockets unveiled unusual smart clothes. These are shorts that cook food. The shorts say “cold” on one pocket and “hot” on the other. According to the manufacturer, if you put food in the second pocket, it will stay warm.
What is Hot Pockets?
Hot Pockets is the name of a frozen food brand, founded in 1983 and owned by the world’s renowned Nestle corporation. Sold mainly in the United States, the brand offers a variety of products, including pizzas, sandwiches, ravioli, and turnovers.
In terms of visual identity, Hot Pockets did not experiment much, using the same red color palette for years, and not adding any graphical elements to its wordmark-based badges.
The original Hot Pockets logo, created in 1983, featured a red underlined inscription in the uppercase of a bold and softened serif typeface, with the first characters in both words significantly enlarged. The wordmark was accompanied by a delicate black “The hot meal in a pocket” tagline.
In 1988 the tagline was rewritten in red capitals and moved to the upper part of the composition. The main lettering was rewritten in a bolder and more rounded font with less space between the characters. The shade of red, used in the composition, got lighter and brighter.
The logo, introduced in 1992, was executed in a three-dimensional geometric serif typeface with distinctive contours and sharp cuts of the bars, set in an intense shade of red with thin black additional lines. A small red rhombus was now separating the two parts of the brand’s name.
After the acquisition of the brand by Nestle, in 2002, the Hot Pockets logo was redesigned again. Now the lettering was set in white against a gradient red glossy rectangular banner in a double outline.
The redesign of 2008 has intensified the shades of red in the Hot Pockets banner, and emboldened the voluminous frame, adding smoothness to the sharp white characters of the white wordmark.
In 2021 the Hot Pockets logo was redrawn in a more modern manner, with fewer volumes and gradients, and with a more interesting typeface. The white inscription was enlarged and rewritten in a smooth sans-serif with the elongated tails of the “Ket” part, and the merged “E” and “T”. The frame was completely removed from the horizontal banner.
The bold uppercase lettering from the primary logo of the Hot Pockets brand is executed in a custom typeface which has somewhat in common with such commercial fonts as Explorer or Masifa Rounded, but with the significantly modified contours of the last characters.
As for the color palette of the Hot Pockets visual identity, it is based on a deep and dark shade of red with smooth tones, which evokes a sense of warmth and confidence, and white stands for the reliability and high quality of the products.